Vacherin Mont Blanc

When you're feeling fragile, the prospect of putting together an involved multi-component composed dessert might just be the proverbial back-breaking straw. Still, if some suitably grand dessert must be put on the table, not all is lost. There're a handful of high-impact low-effort sweets I always fall back on when time's a wastin' and I need to pull something together pronto. Enter stage left: Vacherin Mont Blanc, my most oft-used trick up the sleeve. The cooking and peeling and tamis-ing of actual chestnuts can wait for a mood more masochistic. In this particular quick fix scenario, it should be about smart shopping; if you always have a tin or two of crème de marrons knocking around in the pantry (I like the Clement Faugier brand), than you're pretty much all set. There're scores of recipes for this classic, some easy, some more elaborate (see lovely Keiko's blog for the most exquisite Mont Blanc-based desserts ever). So everytime I make Mont Blanc or a Mont Blanc-style recipe, I try to do it slightly differently.

This time round, I followed the instructions in Claire Clark's Indulge: 100 Perfect Desserts, one of my favourites from 2007's bumper crop of exciting year-end cookbook releases. It's quite possibly one of the simplest recipes in the beautiful book - which ranges in scope from the modest to the most outrageously flamboyant imaginable - by the much feted pastry chef of The French Laundry. But simple here, of course, is sublimely simple.

Crisp shells of snow-white meringue hold mounds of barely sweetened, stiffly whipped cream flavoured with vanilla, rum and crème de marrons and studded with chopped marrons glacés. This is in turn enveloped by an avalanche of chestnut vermicelli. The recipe suggests plating a double-decker; while this makes for a tall and dramatic presentation, it's also a portion size that I found sufficient for 2 especially if people have had anything remotely more filling than soup and a salad to precede (hence the improvised minis in the first picture).

I spent more time tempering the chocolate for the decorations than I did making and assembling the entire dessert, perhaps a tad guilt-stricken at how painless the whole exercise was proving to be. Besides, there's absolutely no excuse for low-effort to look like no-effort!